The Taste of a Woman Read online

  “I’m puzzled.”

  “What if, at that same party, I sidled up to your law partner, Jake, and started rubbing against him? Would you be jealous?”

  He paused, then quickly said, “No, I wouldn’t.”

  She looked out of the corner of her eye as she kept pacing. “What if I hugged him, wrapped one leg around him. What then?”

  He was not so quick to answer this time. He considered. “Well, I still trust you are true to me and that you must have a good reason to be doing this, so, I guess no, I wouldn’t.”

  “I think you’re lying.”

  “I don’t think... no, I’m not lying.”

  “Okay big boy. Suppose I took him by the hand and led him upstairs right in front of you. What then?”

  He couldn’t answer.

  She stopped, victorious. “You see,” she almost shouted, “You have your limits of trust.”

  He had forgotten his coffee while it got cold. He refreshed it.

  “Let me tell you something,” she said. “Perhaps you remember the vacation we took to Maine. As we were checking in the hotel a Navy Officer in his sparkling uniform passed me by. He only glanced at me but I was stricken with desire.”

  “All day I thought about him. I was so weak I couldn’t walk at times. And I knew that if he were to want me, even if it were just for one hour, I would do anything for him. I would give up everything for him: you, our past, the future we had planned. All of it.”

  “You and I made love that afternoon. It was strangely wonderful. But I can tell you that never, at any time, did he leave my mind. All night I could hardly sleep and I realized when I woke the next morning that he was gone. I was devastated but also relieved. The curious thing was, it didn’t interfere with my feelings for you at all. In some way it made them stronger, more complex, and a little sad.”

  As she had been speaking she strolled back into the living room, grazing her fingers along chair backs, tabletops. She swayed, she gestured, she flopped in a chair. He followed as if in a trance, stunned by what he was hearing, not knowing whether to feel anger or pain or guilt or jealousy. Just knowing he was empty of all feeling.

  She was in the soft chair, leaning to one side, draping her leg over the armrest. Her light skirt rose on her thighs like a blessing, traversing the spaces she made between her legs so that his vision was almost to the level of her sex but just not quite there. He noticed that the conversation, while it astonished his emotions it did not drive away his lust. His desire for her was ripping him apart.

  Incredible to him was the mixture of emotional annihilation and switched-on lust. He wanted to fuck her, right now, sitting in her soft chair with her legs apart. It didn’t matter what she had said. Or maybe it did matter in another way, rousing him to want to possess her completely.

  She caught his eye, hot on her body, and she smiled.

  “I’m not going to leave you,” she said, sweetly. “You’re not going to leave me. But the possibility that one of us might leave makes love-making all the more intense.”

  He had nothing to say. Though his mouth was slightly ajar.

  “So I want you to touch Clarisse. I want you to feel her.” She was leaning forward now. “I want you to run you hand up and down that silky chemise of hers and I want you to take it off of her and to run your hands between her legs.” Her voice grew larger. “I want you to spread her on the bed and fuck her and fuck her hard but listen to me and listen very, very closely. Every single move you make on her comes to me.”

  She got up and went to the foot of the stairs where she turned and beckoned to him. “You can have your Clarisse and I can have my Navy Officer and you will see that what comes from that will be well worth the trouble.”

  Then she cocked her hip and looked at him with penetrating eyes. “Don’t you think that women might have a little of that wolf in them too?”

  She turned to the stairs. He saw in her backside the backside of Clarisse and immediately moved in behind her. He watched her hips, Clarisse’s hips, move side to side as she ascended the stair as if seeing her for the first time. He placed his hands on them to capture that movement into his own body. He slipped his hands around between her legs and up her front side a little ways. She paused at the landing and swooned back into his arms which wrapped her completely from behind.

  She freed herself and started up the stairs but his hands were all over her, stroking her arms, the curve of her spine, the saddle back of her waist, the wing of her pelvic bone, the way the hips flared then tapered into long thighs. He cupped her breasts from behind as they walked, half-stumbling down the upstairs hall, slamming against the bedroom door as they entered in. She was half naked by the time they stood in the bedroom, her blouse hanging delicately from one arm, her skirt half-way down her legs.

  She turned abruptly and planted a sloppy kiss on him pushing her active mouth against him so hard that he was propelled backward long enough to lose ground in their hasty jaunt to the bed. But he overcame her and shoved her on the bed where for his watchful eye she caressed her own body, rubbing the little crease between the leg and the tummy, lifting her breasts. “Take me,” she whispered. “Please.”

  He sat on the bed and watched her caressing herself until he was about to explode. What he saw was Clarisse, Clarisse showing her body for the first time. He was entranced by her bravado in the face of such newness between them. He was ignited by her willingness to give herself.

  He undressed her, carefully, slowly, raising the tension to the breaking point. He knew he was the Naval Officer. He knew she was a highly sexual Clarisse.

  He spread her legs. He commanded her to close her eyes. He spread her arms on the bed and stared at her. He made her wait. He put himself in her mouth. She lapped at him hungrily, taking him deep into her throat. She nibbled at him with her sharp teeth. She never did that before. He cried out and recoiled in painful pleasure but did not withdraw. She kept at it. He yelped but reflexly pushed further inside with an intensity that felt almost like anger. She began biting gently on him, opening her jaw between clenches so he could escape if he wished. He did not wish. The pain was great but the pleasure was greater. He was enlarging into the expanding realm of pleasure as if rising weightless into the clouds. He felt as if his penis had become three times larger, no, larger than even he himself, though it had not changed. So stimulated he could stand it no more, he turned to lie on top of her and enter her with such force she folded like a silk cloth catching a falling stone, arms and legs wrapped tightly around him, clinging, contracting, digging nails into butt and shoulders.

  Clarissa was the one. She was the wife, the lover, the temptress, the unattainable hot woman across the dance floor who had offered herself to him. He could see her face in the face he kissed, could see her shoulders, the tight breasts, her thin midsection a fulcrum for the pumping of her pelvis against him.

  They were on the bed by the window, the light from the open drifting around them like harmonious music you feel in your bones but cannot hear. The breeze lifted the curtain over them. In that rare moment, when stimulation surrounded by tranquility were both so great, they hardly recognized when orgasm had arrived until completely spent from the effort of it all. So it was for them, exhausted, still hanging onto the rhythms of love-making as if there might be one more drop of nectar to drink.

  Spent. Exhausted. They lay on the bed half-sleeping in the wash of wind and rain that rejuvenating air offers the skin after exhilaration. They were content, jealous, afraid, and filled with satisfaction.

  The wolf would rest. For a while.

  Notes:

  1. My Uncooked Biscuit

  The plot line of this story was borrowed from a section of Departures, a memoir by Paul Zweig, Harper and Row, New York 1986.

  2. Ovid and the Darwinian Matter of Survival

  These lines were quoted f
rom Ovid the first century Roman poet and author:

  “Many women long for what eludes them and like not what is offered.”

  “Love and dignity cannot share the same abode.”

  “A horse never runs so fast as when he has other horses to catch up with and outpace.”

  “Neither can the wave that has passed be recalled nor the hour that has passed return again.”

  “At times it is folly to hasten, at others, to delay. The wise do everything in its proper time.”

  “Remember, sex is animal, eroticism cares nothing about the personality, love. . ”

  “Where belief is painful, men are slow to believe.”

  “We have nothing that is not perishable but what our hearts and intellect endows us with.”

  “The prayers of cowards are never answered.”

  3. With Your Eyes

  A tip of the hat to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut for the Navy Officer vacation memory sequence rewritten and embedded in the story.

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